SOA is a method of linking resources on demand. In an SOA, resources are made available to other processes on the network as independent services that can be accessed in a standardized way. This provides for more flexible "loose coupling" of resources than in traditional systems architectures. But while there has been much hype, there are few companies that have real evidence of having successfully implemented SOA.

Standard Life, however, claims that it has exposed 250 business processes as services, any of which could be reused by other applications as they all conform to the XML standard and the company's own design pattern and support framework. The infrastructure is in turn built on top of IBM's Websphere platform and DB2 Universal Database, running on IBM eServer p690 systems and zSeries mainframes.

Standard Life's application design manager Derek Ireland told ComputerWire that of 250 services, about 123 are used by more than one application, some by three or more applications. There are 70 applications that consume those 250 services.